In networking, bandwidth and processing resources at each network are utilized in packet transmission. The amount of transmission correlates to the amount of bandwidth and processing resource consumed, and it is desirable to minimize transmission of and/or remove redundancy in packets prior to transmission. When packets are updated to remove redundancy, the updated packets are restored at the destination by adding back the removed redundancy so the original packets can be utilized without the end user of the packets realizing the changes of the packets during transmission.
One way to remove redundancy in packets is through caching. Caching may be generally categorized into two types. One type is object caching, which removes transmission redundancy at the object level. For example, for access hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) content, a client sends a request for an object (e.g., file, document, image, etc.) to a server. Instead of directly retrieving the object from the server, the request is intercepted by a proxy server, which checks if the proxy server has the object in its local cache. If it has the object, the proxy server responds by sending the cached object without the server retrieving the object.
Object Caching is Most Useful in the Following Scenarios:
                The transmitted content does not change much;        The transmitted content can be pre-populated prior to users trying to access it; and/or        The transmitted content needs to be accessed by multiple users.        
Object caching is typically limited to specific protocols, and if a byte changes, the whole object has to be retrieved again. Thus, if the transmitted content is not static, another type of caching, byte caching, may be utilized. Byte caching is a protocol-independent bidirectional caching technique that functions by looking for a common sequence of data. If any duplicate is found, the duplicate data is removed from the byte sequence, and in its place, a token is added. Byte caching is useful in accelerating traffic, and it may be used along with object caching to further accelerate specific protocols. Byte caching looks for repetition of exact sequences of data, and if an exact match is not found, byte caching does not compress the data to be transmitted.